31–40 of 179 posts
That's nothing. His buddies beheaded hundreds and exploded bombs in marketplaces in the same amount of time!
This article will not change anything. By the time our day end we will have been bombarded by so much other information that it will just be one more forgotten thing. And there's so much things that are revolting that our brains are just shutting down as a self defense mechanism. Sociopaths in power don't even need to hide anymore, they know they are hidden in the noise. I mean look at Turkey : they help ISIS, they s…
The same as when they are "our" dictators, or "theirs". Whether the government is murdering "communists in their 10s / 100s of thousands or whether the government is trying to improve the lot of the country's people via social programs at the experience of foreign (our) international businesses.
This article will not change anything. By the time our day end we will have been bombarded by so much other information that it will just be one more forgotten thing. And there's so much things that are revolting that our brains are just shutting down as a self defense mechanism. Sociopaths in power don't even need to hide anymore, they know they are hidden in the noise. I mean look at Turkey : they help ISIS, they s…
This might sound harsh but look beyond the metaphor; if I wake up in the morning and find poop in the toilet, it's not really such a big surprise. But if I find poop on the kitchen table, well we have reason to be concerned now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure this kind of disgusting behaviour can ever be justified.
I'm alright with it, as long as we know the person is a threat to our national security. The people who commit acts like the Boston Marathon Bombings, the Brussels Bombings, 9/11, etc. - these people are not our friends. If given the opportunity, they would kill every single one of us. So if the people who are on our side feel they need to use torture on these people to keep us safe, I'm not going to argue with them.
The Bush administration said that Abu Zubaydah was al-Qai'da; he was not. They said he helped bin Laden escape Afghanistan; he did not. They said he had intelligence justifying the invasion of Iraq; he had none. Every justification they gave for his imprisonment and torture was either disproved or a simple lie, and yet they continued. In the end, their justification was simply, "He hates us, and we hate him."
This is a troubling basis on which to exercise military power. And once the executive arrogates for himself the power to place persons beyond the pale of domestic and international customary law, it's very hard to keep that demon in the box where you want him. To paraphrase, when all the laws lay flat, what will hide us from unjust power?
Well if he didn't hate the CIA before then he probably does now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe torture can be justified to extract information from suspected terrorists, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll ... Only 15 percent said torture should never be used ... The Reuters/Ipsos poll included 1,976 people. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2.5 percentage points for the entire group" http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-torture-exclu...
We can see physical or psychological torture used effectively in many TV series. I have read that in real life, torture was very ineffective to make people tell something they want to hide. Generally people die without speaking or do not know any valuable secret. Remember at school. When one child get punished, all the other childs of the class become quiet. The main desired effect of torture is manipulation of popul…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure this kind of disgusting behaviour can ever be justified.
I'm alright with it, as long as we know the person is a threat to our national security. The people who commit acts like the Boston Marathon Bombings, the Brussels Bombings, 9/11, etc. - these people are not our friends. If given the opportunity, they would kill every single one of us. So if the people who are on our side feel they need to use torture on these people to keep us safe, I'm not going to argue with them.
As the article illustrates, we don't know the person is a threat to our national security. We'll never know with 100% accuracy. The only available options are to accept occasionally torturing people who are innocent or disagreeing with torture and not using it. Most of the civilised world has agreed that the danger of mistakenly torturing innocent people isn't worth it.
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Problem is that it doesn't even give all that much actionable information in the first place.
Yes and no. In the case of somebody who has information waterboarding is generally an 'efficient' strategy. i.e. you have the guy you know hid the bomb somewhere in manhattan. It's just very hard to tell when somebody doesn't know anything. And they will start making up information to make it stop. i.e. 10 guys and you have reason to believe one of them may have hidden a bomb somewhere.
This article will not change anything. By the time our day end we will have been bombarded by so much other information that it will just be one more forgotten thing. And there's so much things that are revolting that our brains are just shutting down as a self defense mechanism. Sociopaths in power don't even need to hide anymore, they know they are hidden in the noise. I mean look at Turkey : they help ISIS, they s…
20 years ago it wouldn't have been news at all. Now it's hard to make things completely vanish. Its just the balance between scandals and outrage has shifted; far more scandals are floating to the surface in the Information Age and outrage has yet to catch up. But it will
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem is that it doesn't even give all that much actionable information in the first place.
Yes and no. In the case of somebody who has information waterboarding is generally an 'efficient' strategy. i.e. you have the guy you know hid the bomb somewhere in manhattan. It's just very hard to tell when somebody doesn't know anything. And they will start making up information to make it stop. i.e. 10 guys and you have reason to believe one of them may have hidden a bomb somewhere.